| Department of Educational and Counselling Psychology Colloquium
Friday, September 21
1:15 - 2:30 pm
Faculty of Education
Room 433
If Meaning Is Constructed, What Is It Made From? Toward a Cultural Theory of Reading
Peter Smagorinsky
University of Georgia
(Co-editor: Research in the Teaching of English,
Award Winner: Cattell Early Career Award for Programmatic Research, American Educational Research Association)
This presentation explores the notion of meaning, particularly as applied to acts of producing and reading texts. The analysis is grounded in principles of activity theory and cultural semiotics and focuses on the ways in which reading takes place among readers and texts in a culturally mediated, codified experience characterized here as the "transactional zone." I build on Vygotsky's work to argue that meaning comes through a reader's generation of new texts in response to the text being read. As a means of accounting for this phenomenon, examples are provided from studies illustrating, for instance, Vygotsky's zones of meaning, the dialogic role of composing during a reading transaction, and the necessity of culturally constructed subjectivity in meaning construction. I conclude by locating meaning in the transactional zone in which signs become tools for extending or developing concepts and the richness of meaning coming from the potential of a reading transaction to generate new texts.
***new email: Robert Bracewell <robert.bracewell@mcgill.ca> voice: 514-398-3443 ***new tel. number***
Fax: 514-398-6968
Robert Bracewell
Associate Professor
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